Death Trap

by Patricia Hall

  ‘No, I don’t suppose she had,’ Beauchamp said as if it was not an event he relished. ‘Did you spend a lot of time with her then? She’d gone a bit gaga, you know. You can’t take everything she said seriously.’

  ‘Really,’ Kate said. ‘She seemed to have her wits about her when I was there.’

  Beauchamp scowled at that, his eyes angrier than seemed necessary at the contradiction. ‘She couldn’t accept that we were short of money,’ he said curtly. ‘She wanted to live like she and my father lived before the war and there were no funds for that. No funds at all. Anyway, I didn’t expect to be discussing my mother’s situation. That was not the reason I called.’ He turned his back on Kate to address himself exclusively to Tess. ‘As you must know, Miss Farrell, this is the only flat in the house that is occupied now, and it won’t take me long to clear out my mother’s place. I’ll be doing that in the next couple of days. So I’m afraid what I’ve brought you is notice to quit. I plan to sell the house as quickly as possible, and for that I need it vacant. I’d like you out by the end of the month.’

  He handed Tess the envelope and turned on his heel and made to leave. But Marie, who had come out of the kitchen with a dish of mashed potatoes in hand, stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘And what if we can’t find anywhere else to go?’ she asked. ‘What are we supposed to do then?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not my problem,’ Beauchamp said. ‘You’ve been served notice to quit, all legal and above board which is what my buyer wants.’

  ‘Who’s your buyer? Will he want to put us out on the street?’ Marie persisted. ‘Can we ask him – or her?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Beauchamp snapped. ‘My buyer is nothing to do with you. Any buyer would want vacant possession. The tenants go and the sale goes through. So, that’s the situation. If you’re not out by the due date you’ll be evicted. And I don’t think you’ll enjoy that at all. Just remember, I’m pretty sure you’re in breach of your tenancy anyway by having your friend staying here, which is what I understand is going on, so I could have you thrown out tonight if I felt like it. You’ve got ten days’ grace so think yourselves lucky. Goodnight to you.’

  And this time he made it to the door and slammed it behind him, leaving the three girls too stunned to protest.

  ‘Oh feck,’ Marie said. ‘Why don’t I learn to keep my big gob shut? I just made it worse.’

  ‘He wasn’t going to change his mind, whatever we said,’ Kate said.

  ‘We knew it was coming,’ Tess said. ‘It was obvious when no one took over Flat Three, and they went to all that trouble to get the Wilsons out. If we don’t go we’ll be next for the Alsatian treatment. Lord Muck won’t bother evicting us politely like a gentleman. He won’t want to get his own hands dirty. He’ll leave it to the scallies.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why he told me his mother was going gaga when she obviously wasn’t,’ Kate said. ‘She was very fed up, that’s true, and I know she was selling off her treasures to keep going, so she must have been pretty well broke. But there didn’t seem to be much wrong with her wits.’

  ‘Her dying’s a bit convenient for him, isn’t it?’ Marie asked. ‘He might get a bit annoyed that she was selling off her jewellery but he’d get very annoyed if she was stopping him from selling the house. If we’re in his way, she must have been in his way with knobs on, don’t you think?’

  Kate felt slightly sick as Marie triumphantly went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of sizzling sausages.

  ‘Tra la,’ she cried triumphantly, then glanced at Kate. ‘You think I’m right, don’t you, la? He bumped the old girl off so the house was all his. Maybe you need your tame bizzy after all.’

  DS Harry Barnard tracked down Lazlo Roman to his eyrie overlooking Lords and rang his doorbell soon after seven that evening. He flashed his warrant card towards the manservant who opened the door without giving him time to read it, and was shown into a large sitting room with a picture window overlooking the cricket ground where a short, heavily built man was sitting in an armchair reading the Times, with a glass of what looked like whiskey on a side table beside him.

  ‘A policeman, sir,’ the impassive servant said, as if the arrival of the law unannounced was an everyday occurrence, though Roman’s eyebrows registered surprise.

  ‘Can I help you, officer?’ he asked. His accent was pronounced but not easily identifiable and his dark eyes completely inscrutable. He waved Barnard into an armchair close to his own, where his visitor sank into cushions deeper than he believed possible and picked up his glass without offering Barnard anything similar.

  ‘I think maybe you can help, sir,’ Barnard said. ‘I am involved in an investigation in West London into the harassment of tenants and it is proving difficult to pin down the ownership of some properties in the area. My question is a very simple one. I have a list of properties here and I wondered if you would be good enough to tell me if you own any of them.’ He handed Roman a short list of addresses which he had randomly selected and typed out that afternoon but which included the house in Argyll gardens currently occupied by Kate and her friends.

  Roman made no objection and ran his eye quickly down the list and shook his head. ‘I own none of these,’ he said. ‘But I am in negotiation to buy this house in Argyll Gardens. The contract is not yet signed. I am hoping to purchase it from a Mr Miles Beauchamp. He has promised me vacant possession but I have no idea if he has achieved that yet. There were still tenants in the building when I last spoke to him.’

  ‘That’s very helpful, sir,’ Barnard said. ‘Do you have any idea how Mr Beauchamp is persuading his tenants to leave the property?’

  Roman’s face darkened slightly. ‘I have no idea, officer,’ he said. ‘And I think I should make one thing quite clear. My name is not Peter Rachman. True, I buy property and renovate it, as he did, and then let out flats. And I can’t do the necessary renovations with tenants still in the building. But I am a businessman, not a criminal. Not all landlords are criminals, as I’m sure you know. I do here what I did before the war in my own country and I think my tenants are well treated, my rents are moderate, and there are no complaints. I provide a much-needed service and my tenants pay me for it. Believe me, if you have seen homeless people living fifteen, twenty, to a stinking cellar room in a bombed out building, you do not want to see those conditions ever again. If you don’t believe me ask some of the West Indians who can’t get homes because most landlords don’t want them. Ask Nelson Mackintosh who has a cafe in Notting Hill if he has heard complaints about me as a landlord and how grateful many of his people are for what I do.’

  Barnard hid his surprise at the unexpected introduction of Mackintosh’s name into the conversation. ‘I suppose you know Nelson Mackintosh is currently on remand in prison?’ Barnard said.

  Roman looked blank. ‘No I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘I met a group of West Indians at his cafe more than a year ago and he explained to me how difficult it was for his people to find homes in the area. If you have seen at first hand where hatred and suspicion of groups of people can lead, if you have seen at first hand ghettos and transportations to camps, you bear that in mind in your dealings always.’

  ‘You’re Jewish?’ Barnard asked and was surprised when Roman shook his head.

  ‘It was not only the Jews Hitler disliked,’ he said. ‘Unusually, I was born in a conventional house but my family were gypsies way back. They tried to conform but that made no difference in the end. What is Nelson Mackintosh supposed to have done?’

  ‘He’s been charged with drug possession,’ Barnard said. ‘But there may be more serious charges than that.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ Lazlo Roman said. ‘I thought he was a man trying to do the best for his people.’ Which might well be true, Barnard thought grimly, but that clearly did not impress the many people, including some in the police force, who did not give tuppence for Mackintosh’s people, who would rather they were simply not the
re.

  ‘Do you know who owns any of the houses where tenants are being harassed, sir? It’s certainly going on.’

  ‘No. I don’t know specifically. Like you, I hear rumours. That is all. If there are criminals like that in Notting Hill, and I believe there are many, it is up to you to deal with them.’

  That too, Barnard thought, was also true, but no one at Notting Hill nick showed any inclination to intervene. He sighed.

  ‘There is one thing that you might help me with, Officer,’ Roman said unexpectedly. ‘It is something which has happened in the last month or so, and I have never experienced before.’

  ‘If I can, sir,’ Barnard said, wondering what was coming.

  ‘I have been contacted by telephone. I am not sure how anyone got my number, which is ex-directory, but that is not important. But they seem to know which properties I own. Someone is well informed about my affairs. I think I have had five or six calls, all of them asking the same thing. They want me to pay them sums of money for protection. I ask them protection from what, and they say all the things that can go wrong in a house. They say I need insurance, which is true, but what they mean is their sort of insurance.’

  ‘Protection on houses? I’ve never heard of that before. There are rackets which make demands on pubs and clubs, small businesses in Soho and maybe in Notting Hill too. But houses are a new development,’ Barnard said thoughtfully.

  ‘I refused, of course, but since then there have been problems in some of my properties. A flood in one, windows smashed in the night, a small fire. I begin to feel that I need the police to look into this.’

  ‘You need to contact the police in Notting Hill,’ Barnard said, without enthusiasm. ‘I’m not based there myself.’ And he had little confidence that protection rackets would be pursued with any more vigour there than they were in Soho. There would be too many CID fingers in that pie.

  ‘I may do that, Officer,’ Roman said.

  Barnard was pretty sure that Roman would mention this evening’s visit to whoever he spoke to at Notting Hill nick, but even more certain that his reticence with his name and rank would leave his colleagues there none the wiser.

  ‘Thank you for your time, sir,’ he said, feeling it was more than time to depart, but rising to his feet with difficulty from his enveloping chair. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Very helpful indeed.’ And as he went down in the lift he wondered whether it was King Devine or Ray Robertson who had decided to attempt to milk landlords in a new extension of a very old racket, and one which threatened serious danger to innocent tenants in rackety, overcrowded flats. He really must get Kate O’Donnell and her friends from Liverpool out of there.

  After she and her friends had eaten, and gloomily considered the limited options Miles Beauchamp had left them, Kate told Tess and Marie that she needed some fresh air. Tess looked up from the books she was marking and shook her head.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, and Marie, who was watching TV, shrugged.

  ‘I have to watch Z Cars, la,’ she said, with a slightly shamefaced laugh. ‘I can’t live without a regular dose of Fancy Smith.’

  Kate slipped into a coat and went downstairs alone, very aware of the emptiness of the house now all the other occupants had gone. The stairs had always creaked, she thought, and the water pipes gurgled, but she had never noticed when they mingled with the other residents’ more homely noises of conversation and radios and TVs. Now, as she descended in the dim light, she felt uneasy. Outside the front door she stood on the top step for a moment and looked up and down the street. It was an unusually chilly autumn evening and there was no one in sight. She had not mentioned it to her friends but her intentions were quite clear in her own mind. Turning left at the bottom of the steps, she opened the gate to the basement area and slipped quickly down the steps and out of sight to Cecily Beauchamp’s front door.

  She turned the handle gently, not expecting it to open, and when it did she hesitated, wondering if Cecily’s son had decided to start his clear-out of his mother’s possessions already. But there was no light inside and no sound, and when she popped her head back up to pavement level, no sign of a parked car which might belong to the landlord. She guessed that what she was doing was illegal but she did not care very much. She felt a strong sense of outrage at the way the old woman had died, alone and uncared for, and a firm conviction that her sudden death had been just too convenient for her son.

  She left the front door open so that some of the light from the street above would filter in. She did not want to attract attention by turning on the light in the living room. But as she wove her way to the back of the flat, she risked putting the light on in the kitchen, and then in the bedroom and bathroom, as she began to look around with no clear idea at all of what she was looking for. As she worked her way round the untidy kitchen, which gave every sign that Cecily Beauchamp was no longer able to look after herself, the fridge almost empty, the kettle furred up and dirty dishes piled in the sink, she realised that the police did not seem to have searched the place thoroughly, if at all. Every dirty surface and dusty corner seemed undisturbed.

  Sergeant Eddie Lamb, who had been there, and taken her statement about finding the body, must have concluded pretty quickly that this was a natural or an accidental death, not anything more sinister, she thought. In the bedroom, she found the bed was unmade and the room apparently equally untouched. Idly, Kate opened the drawer in Cecily’s bedside table and to her surprise found a well-used diary which she flipped through quickly and then slipped into her coat pocket. It would make an interesting read, she thought, even if it did not contain any information that was incriminating. There was also a small bureau where Mrs Chamberlain seemed to have filed her domestic papers but when she riffled through the bundles there seemed to be nothing there more significant than bills across which someone had scrawled Paid in handwriting which was not Cecily’s own.

  She moved on to the bathroom, which was in a similar state of neglect, and where she expected to find some evidence of Cecily’s supposed medical condition. Didn’t diabetics have to have injections, she asked herself, recalling one of her aunts who had shown her syringes and small phials once and explained how she had to inject herself to control the disease. She opened the bathroom cupboards and found the usual jumble of aspirins and very aged first aid requisites, but no sign of prescribed medication or syringes. If Cecily Beauchamp really was diabetic there was no indication of it nor that she was getting any medical treatment at all. Harry Barnard, Kate thought wryly, would probably tell her she was imagining a crime without any evidence, and would certainly tell her to get out of the flat right now.

  Kate wandered back into the dimly lit living room and sighed. She had come into the flat on an impulse and should go now. If anyone saw her here it could lead to endless complications. She picked her way carefully in semi-darkness through Cecily’s cluttered tables and shelves, and noticed a few obvious spaces, which must be what Miles had already taken away: the most valuable items, no doubt, leaving only a footprint in the dusty surfaces. She was about to leave when she heard a commotion in the street above. A dog was barking and a woman’s voice was raised in anger. She stood just outside the door in the covered area, amongst the windblown litter and leaves, listening intently. To her horror she recognised unnervingly close above her head, a second voice with a serious stutter. The men who had terrified Geoff and Elsie Wilson into abandoning their flat had returned and seemed to be standing at the front door immediately above being harangued by someone whose voice she did not recognise. Cautiously she went up the area steps far enough to put her head above pavement level to see what was going on.

  She had been right about the men and their dog being on the doorstep, and they were certainly not alone. A woman stood on the pavement, facing them with her hands on her hips, and to Kate’s relief a uniformed police constable was approaching from further down the street at a pace just short of urgent.

  ‘Now, now,’ he said. ‘What’s the
trouble here?’

  ‘They’re at it again, these beggars,’ the woman said loudly. ‘They’re here, there and everywhere, frightening people in their own homes. You lot seem to think it’s a joke, but it’s not. They’re villains, they are. It’s not right. You should do something about it.’

  Kate could see the bizzy’s boots firmly planted at the bottom of the steps leading up to the front door.

  ‘Have you got legal business here?’ he asked, but Kate could not hear Stuttering Stan’s reply. Whatever it was, the large police boots moved back slightly and Kate could hear footfalls on the steps as the men descended to the pavement dragging the snarling dog behind them.

  ‘Sling your hook,’ the policeman said. ‘And don’t come back.’ Relieved as she was, Kate did not think for a moment that the thugs would take much notice of that advice, in spite of Miles Beauchamp giving them until the end of the month to move out. Stuttering Stan could probably be regarded as reinforcement of the notice to quit. She wondered whether the officer’s presence was a result of Harry Barnard’s intervention or simply a chance encounter. Either way, she reckoned it would take a twenty-four hour police guard on their front door to keep the scallies and their dog away entirely. She turned to close the basement door behind her and made her way back to the front door. The only solution, she knew, was to get out of 95 Argyll Gardens as quickly as they could.

  TWELVE

  Kate sat on her sofa late that evening, after Marie and Tess had gone to bed. She pulled her blankets up to her chin against the chill now the gas fire had been turned off, and set about reading Cecily Beauchamp’s diary. There was little enough there, she thought, but what was there was interesting, neatly inscribed in a spidery, old-fashioned hand. Mrs Beauchamp had noted down her appointments meticulously: she saw her doctor roughly every two months, though there was no indication of who he was, or how she got to his surgery. But such regular visits, Kate thought, must be an indication of a serious medical problem. And about six months previously she had entered an appointment with her solicitor, although again no name was mentioned but the purpose was. A single word, ‘Will’, said it all. If there was a will, Kate thought, and she knew it had not been in the bureau in Cecily’s bedroom, maybe the solicitor had kept it or, the more sinister option, Miles Beauchamp had not liked the contents and had removed it along with the other items he had taken immediately after her death.